Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

1 Introduction 1

2 Empire 7

3 Colony 27

4 Slavery and Race 42

5 Colonialism and Imperialism 52

6 Nation 66

7 Nationalism 77

8 Anticolonialism 85

9 Decolonization 103

10 Neo]colonialism, Globalization, Planetarity 117

11 Postcolony 135

12 Postcolonialism 149

References 178

Name Index 191

Subject Index 195

About the Author

Robert JC Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. His writing ranges across the fields of cultural and political history, literature, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis and translation studies, with a particular focus on colonial history and postcolonial theory. His publications include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Wiley, 2001), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), and The Idea of English Ethnicity (Wiley, 2008). He is the editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Reviews

"This book presents a synoptic, thoughtful, critical survey of key ideas, concepts and historical patterns in the study of empires, colonialisms, and their various `posts'. But it also does much more than that. It offers original, often contentious ideas on many aspects of this huge field. It is a balanced overview, but unafraid of venturing into controversy where needed. The relevant intellectual worlds have often been seen as sharply divided between historians and social scientists on one hand, literary and cultural theorists on the other. Young's work brilliantly shows how these separate spheres can be brought together." Stephen Howe, University of Bristol "Robert Young's new book develops a lucid and powerful understanding of the postcolonial as affiliated with other sites of a general struggle for justice, including gender, class, and the environment. Modest in size, it is strikingly ambitious, and in effect it delivers a history of the world and the ideas that have shaped it, from a global perspective." Douglas Kerr, Hong Kong University